NIST seeks sources for semantic coherence

On April 12, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) posted a sources sought notice for semantic coherence (Solicitation Number: AMD-SS18-01915). Responses are due by 11:00 a.m. Eastern on April 19.

NIST is seeking responses from all responsible sources, including large, foreign, and small businesses. Small businesses are defined under the associated NAICS code for this effort, 541690 Other Scientific and Technical Consulting Services, as those domestic sources having 15 million or less annually.

NIST is supporting evaluation activities for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Active Interpretation of Disparate Alternatives (AIDA) program. The AIDA program envisions a system that extracts information from text, video, and audio, collects that information into a knowledge base, and allows analysts to query the knowledge base. The extractions will be noisy and conflicting, due to the state of the art in extraction technology as well as active disinformation efforts. As a result, the knowledge base will not be consistent, and the analyst needs to be able to understand how different pieces of information influence different hypotheses about the data in the knowledge base. The analyst also brings their own hypotheses which they need to be able to set as background to a query.

Technical Area (TA) 3 of the AIDA program requires AIDA performers to produce hypotheses for the analyst that are semantically coherent. The notion of semantic coherence is ill-defined, but broadly means that the hypothesis doesn’t contradict itself, contains only pertinent information, and is comprehensible to the analyst. AIDA performers will propose measures of semantic coherence, but in order to evaluate TA3, NIST needs to develop an independent measure of semantic coherence. NIST wants this measure to reflect an analyst-relevant perspective (user-focused coherence), rather than measures of the structure of the hypothesis only (system-focused coherence).

Full information is available here.

Source: FedBizOpps